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Harry Wilmer contracted tuberculosis while serving as
an intern in a hospital in Panama in 1941, and his awareness of the
effects of treatment on the patient perhaps began from the two years he
was recovering from what then was a life-threatening disease. In the
routine of the sanatorium he was able to observe the effects of the
treatment regime, the staff and other patients. From this experience he
wrote This is Your World: a Book for the Orientation of Professional
Workers to the Emotional Problems of Tuberculosis. (Charles C. Thomas,
Springfield, Illinois, 1952).
His training in psychiatry, which lasted four years, began at the Mayo
Clinic in 1946. He then moved to California, establishing a department
of psychiatry at the Palo Alto Clinic and teaching at Stanford. He began
a personal (Freudian) psychoanalysis.
Harry Wilmer was drafted into the US Navy in 1955 and assigned to the US
Naval Hospital, Oakland, California. He had visited the UK in the spring
of 1950, where he¹d met Maxwell Jones, Tom Main, T.P. Rees, and Joshua
Bierer. After his induction, the Navy sent him back to revisit. Upon his
return to Oakland, he established a democratic therapeutic community,
the first in North America, which he directed for 1,000 psychotic,
neurotic and character disorder Naval and Marine Corps patients.
He studied the relationships between staff and patients and the dynamics
of the groups with the aid of ethnologist Gregory Bateson and filmed the
meetings. His experiment was made into a powerful docudrama, “People
Need People,” staring Lee Marvin, hosted by Fred Astaire, and aired at
prime time on ABC television and subsequently on the BBC. He described
he work in Social Psychiatry in Action: A Therapeutic Community (Charles
C. Thomas, Springfield, Illinois, 1958).
Sensing the possibilities for moving in new directions made possible by
President Kennedy¹s Community Mental Health Act, he arranged for his
friend Maxwell Jones to come to Stanford for a year as a visiting
professor. Together they collaborated with Calvin Young and established
a community mental health service in nearby San Mateo, which became a
prototype of this new approach. In the summer of 1967, Harry Wilmer
began a novel therapeutic community project at the University of
California, San Francisco, for young hippy, substance abusers from the
Haight- Ashberry district -- victims of psychotic reactions to the
hallucinogens or amphetamines. He introduced interactive television as
an aid to self-observation, and organized poetry, film and creativity
seminars, bringing in artists such as Joan Baez, Ansel Adams, and Rod
Steiger to inspire the youth. He called his method “synesthetic
psychotherapy,”
Simultaneously Dr Wilmer initiated a therapeutic community at San
Quentin Prison in 1961 for recidivists involving family groups including
their children, which operated for the next five years.
In 1969 he moved to Texas, where he created a Jungian-oriented
therapeutic community at a Veterans Hospital for service personnel who
had served in Vietnam suffering from schizophrenia and post-traumatic
stress disorder: “to balance the outer and inner worlds in a milieu
where dreams, visions, hallucinations, and delusions are of value for
their meaning, and where the unconscious may be given equal weight with
the here and now.” (in a contributed chapter to Peter Oswald¹s
Communication and Social Interaction, Grune & Stratton, 1977). His work
was extended to patients with AIDS.
Harry Wilmer retired from psychiatry in 1980 and established the
Institute for the Humanities at Salado, Texas, where he brought
scholars, artists, and Nobel laureates to give lectures and conduct
workshops over the years--people such as Isaac Bashevis Singer, Linus
Pauling, Ilya Prigogine; Laurens van der Post, Maya Angelou, John K.
Gailbraith, Rollo May, Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, Edward Albee, and Anthony
Stevens. He sponsored symposia and international film festivals.
He was a prolific writer, publishing papers in the professional press
and media, contributing poetry to journals and magazines, writing plays,
and illustrating many of his books with accomplished line drawings. His
three books for children, on the mind, tuberculosis and syphilis, were
carried on a running set of cartoon characters as an integral part of
the story. For the last eight years, he was devoting much of his time to
writing his memoirs, drawing from the extensive notes, papers and
correspondence he maintained over his life time.
Harry Wilmer traveled widely, read papers and attended professional
meetings, seeking new ideas and expanding his personal and professional
repertoire. In November of last year he attended a workshop on Tai Chi
in California. The following month he experienced a threatening fall.
Although the therapeutic community abounds in pioneers-- indeed that is
its essence-- one would have to search its varied accomplishments to
find a forerunner whose discipline was more extensive and creative.
His papers and archives at located at the Harry Ransom Humanities
Research Center at the University of Texas at Austin. spl@mail.utexas.edu.
Dennie Briggs
March 24, 2005
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